“I had been hungry for liturgy all my life,” writes Melody S. Gee in We Carry Smoke & Paper. “I had wanted to know where I belonged and to whom.” The essays in this collection (some of which first appeared in Commonweal) explore those questions. Gee, the adopted Taiwanese daughter of Chinese parents, navigates barriers of language and culture and considers what we owe our family and ourselves. In a time when prominent Catholic converts are famous for reactionary or traditionalist stances, Gee’s essays offer a refreshing, thoughtful, and moving account of finding in Catholicism settledness and consolation—“a quiet, firm kind of whisper: this.” 

We Carry Smoke & Paper
Essays on the Grief and Hope of Conversion
Melody S. Gee
University of Iowa Press
$22 | 200 pp.

For the last century, American agriculture has been dominated by farming methods that can feed a lot of people, but do so by depleting the soil, polluting the environment, impoverishing farmers, and ultimately making food less nutritious. In From the Ground Up, Stephanie Anderson profiles the women who are farmers, ranchers, community organizers, and investors leading the shift toward regenerative agriculture—farming methods that restore soil health and produce more nutritious food. Anderson argues that these methods, which require more local control of our food systems, will make us more resilient to system shocks like Covid or climate disasters. She focuses on women “not only because of their contributions to the regenerative movement, but also because conveying their experiences will, I hope, help shift notions about who belongs in the food system.”

From the Ground Up
The Women Revolutionizing Regenerative Agriculture
Stephanie Anderson
The New Press
$26.03 | 256 pp.

“One day it will be considered unacceptable in the polite liberal circles of the West,” muses Omar El Akkad in his searing critique of mainstream liberal responses to the atrocities in Gaza, “not to acknowledge all the innocent people killed in that long-ago unpleasantness.” I’m writing this review in San Salvador, at the heart of a country—much like Palestine—shaped both by American weaponry and liberal complicity. My presence illustrates his point: an American liberal visiting forty-five years later and learning about “all the innocent people killed in that long-ago unpleasantness.” El Akkad’s observations about the stunned silence of Western liberals regarding Gaza rang true in El Salvador, too: Carter, much like Biden after him, continued to fund massacres even after St. Óscar Romero’s murder had made the Salvadoran government’s abuses blindingly obvious. 

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
Omar El Akkad
Knopf
$28 | 208 pp.